"The Metabolites" by Adam Dickinson
SPECIMEN REPORT
In order to test your body for the range of
chemicals you have requested, you will need to
send in approximately 62 mL of serum
(equivalent to about 150 mL of whole blood)
and approximately 6 mL of urine. Both the
urine and serum should be sent in amber glass
jars and cooled to below 4 degrees C. Using
the morning void would be best. There are no
other restrictions besides making sure that the
serum sample does not come into contact with
any Teflon.
CARDBOARD COCONUT HANGING FROM A STRING
Mono-ethyl phthalate Urine 6. 46 ng/mL
A real estate agent's unventilated office in a
suburban strip mall. The cab of a half-tonne
humid with take-out. A burned-out bathroom
off the meeting rooms for a climate change
conference in Medicine Hat. Try to place the
chemically manufactured smell of fruits and
flowers and you find yourself on a debris flow
into the uncanny valley. Like the creepy
there's-a-knife-missing smile of those alert,
oversized vinyl dolls for children, synthetic
Mango is an overly macheted smell, too
rigidly insistent on narrowly defined versions
of vacation sex and culturally appropriated
tropical breezes. Aloe Blossom is almost
certainly an assassination attempt. It never
succeeds, of course, because it emanates too
much performance anxiety, gives away the
game by forgetting to flick its ash. Pumpkin
Spice is like hugging your grandmother,
inhaling deeply, only to feel some of the
stuffing emerge from the crease in her neck.
Real fruit smells are handwritten notes soaked
with sweat and read by the light of a flesh
wound. They announce depth of desire,
ripeness to act, and cultivated memories built
out of carefully lit sugars. Synthetic fragrances
barely recall anything except our untimely
deaths at the hands of uniformed interiors in
which every recollection becomes a plastic
spoon wearing a mouthful of canned laughter.
They appear in our cells like crayons
misshapen and melted to the seat of a car
parked in the sun.
DISRUPTORS
Mono-n-butyl phthalate Urine 30.9 ng/mL
The young men are laughing as they enjoy
having the bodies of men. At the hotel pool bar
they pollinate each other with urine containing
microscopic pieces of their own skeletons.
Free testosterone circulates within them like
motor oil making rainbows in the heads of
parking spaces. They are not women. Say
otherwise and they will fight you. They will
fight you wearing aftershave and cologne.
They will come at you through mousse and
gearshifts, steering wheels and air fresheners,
through fragrances, hair gels, and blood bags.
They will advance on you through stabilized
rubbers and resins, including nitrocellulose
and polyvinyl acetates, soft gloves, jelly
vibrators, and PVC pants. They will take you
through slow dermal exposure, through their
corresponding monoesters in the gastro-
intestinal tract, through excreted metabolites in
their piss. They will kick your ass through
androgen receptors and blocked endogenous
hormones causing urogenital malformations.
They will fight you. And they will shout down
testicular dysgenesis! Down hypospadias!
Down cryptorchidism! They will be sweating
now and you will hardly recognize them,
holding their limp bathing towels as industry
lobbyists try to rally fishermen against
chemical bans by telling them they will lose
their flexible worms. The young men are
glistening with sweat that comes out of them
like browsing history. The things they touch
touch them back, leaving small oil slicks
inside that throw up rainbows in the signals to
their glands. They are not women. They will
fight you. They believe this with the narrative
authority of an intravenous drip.
Due to technical restrictions, the poem could not be displayed as originally formatted. The margins should be fully justified creating a column of prose without the appearance of line breaks.